Book: The Vanished Man by Jeffery Deaver
Krishna
We have reviewed Lincoln Rhymes featured books by the author here before. The last three reviewed here are The Stone Monkey, The Coffin Dancer and The Bone Collector. If you have been following the reviews you know that I am already a fan.
This book also explains why that is. His style of storytelling is unique and totally gripping. Let us see the story.
A theatre that has seen multiple lives before including an asylum and an old stone building for other purposes.
The killer is leaning over the body of the dead girl with no fear or urgency. The police arrive and he dumbfounds them with a bright light that momentarily blinds the female police officer. He barricades himself into a room and tells them that he has a hostage with him. The police hear a gunshot followed by silence.
When they finally go into the room – one officer through each of the two entrances, they find the room empty. The man had simply vanished from a room from which there were no other ways out.
So the case comes to Stiletto who naturally approaches Lyncoln to help. Meanwhile Kara manages to book a show. She is an illusionist and her mother is in deep coma.
When she meets Sachs, she agrees to help and comes and meets Lincoln. Lincoln asks her to stay and help with the case and she agrees.
Meanwhile, David tries to go out in the evening through the backdoor and is curious about a cat that seems to be wounded. When he goes to tend to it, he realizes that it is mechanical. At the same time, he finds a middle aged man attacking him with a lead pipe. He just manages to escape back into the building and calls 911 for help.
By the time police arrive, the killer has escaped – even though there were there in four minutes flat. They actually met him in the guise of a sweet old lady with a shopping paper bag filled with supposed groceries (a pineapple sticking at the top). He has killed David with a pipe but has sawed him in half (Both murders imitating magic tricks – the first a rope trick and the second obviously cutting open a body in half).
Meanwhile we meet a fanatic cult leader Andrew Constable, who appears polished, polite and suave to talk to. Sachs cannot believe he is the leader of a racist and anarchist cult. He simply says that he is misunderstood and is only asking hard questions about the system in USA. He even has a Jewish lawyer Roth, who swears by his gentleness and learned disposition.
The next victim of the killer Malerick is Cheryl Marston. After ‘calming’ her horse which was frightened by ‘an engineered bird’ but really by ultrasonic sound, he lures her to a restaurant, drugs her and is immersing her in water.
Meanwhile Kara figures out and convinces Rhyme and Amelia that the four hour interval is another illusionist trick and the killer is probably planning his next murder sooner. When they realize that the fibres collected from both killing places is horse hair, they are hot on his trail, by finding Cheryl’s experience and the fact that he took her for coffee. In the restaurant, they learn that she was ‘woozy’ and realize that she has been drugged. Then they hear that the ‘friend’ plans to show her his boat – she had a boat but lost it in her divorce – they hurry towards the Hudson river. Meanwhile at a secluded spot in the river, Malerick, now sans his beard, is slowly plunging Cheryl into the river.
The book is full of interesting tricks of the illusionist. This is the magic of Jeffrey Deaver. If you are talking about the Asian community, he immerses you in the story’s ambience perfectly *(as in The Stone Monkey’. Here you learn much of an illusionist’s bag of tricks. Just amazing!
He is caught in the act, much to his surprise, by the police but manages to evade the tight cordon put around him through a quick change and by a distraction of killing Kara who wandered off. Cheryl was just saved, though.
When as a quick change biker he flees, a police officer manages to cuff him and put restraints on his leg. Looks like the gig is up for Malerick.
Meanwhile Reverend Swenson seems to be blackmailed by militiaman Jeddy Barnes into killing a prosecutor Grady who is going after Andrew Constable, His leverage? Clara Sampson, thirteen, who was molested by the Reverend earlier and which was hushed up with Jeddy’s help. He hides a gun in his suitcase to waylay Grady who was attending his daughter’s performance at a local school in New York state.
When he is caught before even getting close to Grady, we learn that it is a misdirection by Weir. Then the story goes into so many twists and turns that your head spins. Now, Jeffrey Deaver is a master of plot twists but you think even he may have chewed a bit more than he can swallow in this. That itself is an illusion, as he brilliantly explains the denouement in his masterly way.
Consider this: We are led to believe that Weir’s feint was the circus fire, but his real intent is to kill Grady. Then we realize that Grady was not the target but it was really to spring the ‘nice mannered’ Constable from jail – he has the perfect plan for it. Deaver has us convinced that Andrew, while holding weird views, is harmless until he, according to plan and instructions from the Magic Man Malerik, ‘takes care of the lawyer’ in a startling moment in the story.
Then the story goes for Grady’s daughter and you are back to the suspicion that it is all about Grady after all. Finally, you realize that the real target was the circus, which was so obviously hinted at that everyone, including Rhymes assumed that it was a feint.
What follows is breathtaking capture of Malerik, after what he assumes was a successful fire in the circus, as per his plan.
Then come unexpected twists galore. Who really is Malerik? Why is he after the circus? More interestingly, who were his accomplices?
Meanwhile, a person who was tampering with the crime scene (in the car incident where Malerik was trying to drive away in a stolen car with Sachs in hot pursuit and ‘drowned’ in a lake) was handcuffed and isolated and he turns out to be a vengeful politician who is determined to deny Sachs her superintendent qualifications even though she got the third highest marks in the history of the examination in the practicals.
Lovely story. The tension is there, the twists are there.
But the narrative power of Deaver carries it through and makes it enjoyable.
Don’t look for logic here, don’t poke ‘practically speaking’ holes in the story. It is easy to do. You just enjoy the beautiful little deceptions (Remember Sidney Sheldon of yesteryear? Deaver is an updated, more polished and more sophisticated storyteller in the same vein)
Nice read.
8/10
== Krishna